12/12: Meehan Crist, 10 Thoughts on Ends
At the edge, limits are made known. Some limits can be seen a long way off—a wall, an ocean, a sickbed already sour with death—but they can also surprise, just one straw breaking the camel’s back.Of...
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12/13 Sarah Minor: Curating Resistance at The Museum of Everyday Life
“This is real: the shiver we feel when we see a staircase in an old building worn soft in the middle, the proof of thousands of climbings and descents. This is love, the way an object holds evidence of...
View Article12/14, Patrick Madden: Listening Differently
I am none of those who write of grand issues, who peek behind the scenes of our systems to diagnose and prescribe, whose important ideas change minds and hearts and lead to action. Thus I have been...
View Article12/15: Snow--Nicole Walker
It used to be a thing. In Utah, in the nineties, the license plates featured a skier between the letters and the numbers. “The Greatest Snow on Earth” was the slogan. Now, the license plates are muted...
View Article12/16: Lawrence Lenhart, Parasitic Meme Transfusion and the Biography of...
1.For extra income, mom typed her boss’s chicken-scratch memoirs: a chronology of his greatness, his executive legacy. After dinner, she read excerpts to us aloud. We clucked at his hubris. The...
View Article12/17: Erica Trabold, What Christmas Means to Me: A Timeline
1967I am not yet a glimmer in my parents’ baby-boomer-pre-pubescent eyes. They are brown-haired children in stocking caps, watching flaky snow dust the farms and fields of Nebraska. My parents won’t...
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12/18, “Race is always there in my writing”: An Interview with Steffan...
In April of 2015, the editor of BOAAT Press and BOAAT journal, Sean Shearer, asked if I would be interested in becoming the Essays Editor for the journal. Initially a publication devoted to poetry and...
View Article12/19: Kyoko Mori, Repetitions
“Repetitions,” the Van Gogh exhibit at the Phillips Collection in 2013, featured 35 works on 14 subjects, including multiple paintings of his bedroom in Arles, the postman Joseph Roulin and his family,...
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12/20: Ander Monson, That Tingling Feeling
What mood are you in right now, and how has reading aided or abetted your atmosphere? —Mary CappelloMary Cappello, Mary Ruefle, Lia Purpura, and Kathleen Peirce: I hereby name four writers who have...
View Article12/21: Craig Reinbold, had a title but lost it
Well, as I find myself saying a little too often these days, shit.I posted a piece here at the Daily a few years ago about the difficulties of writing later in life, when we’re bogged down, when that...
View Article12/22: Erin Zwiener, How To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About
I don’t know how to essay right now. In the five weeks since Donald Trump became President-elect of the United States of America, I have written, but I have not essayed. There was the brief rage typing...
View Article12/23: Dave Griffith, “You gotta serve somebody”: On the Religious Essay
The first day of Advent this year was November 27thand it ends tomorrow, December 24th. This is not something you would know from looking at my son’s LEGO Star Wars Advent calendar, which has...
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Special Delivery -- from Dave Mondy
Spot a boxy UPS truck pinballing through town -- especially today -- and there's a slight twinge.It's not nostalgia -- I don't miss delivering UPS packages -- but I when see a brown-clad man darting...
View Article12/25: As The Year Comes To A Close, Treat Yourself To Some Essay Collections
2016 is, finally, at long last, almost (hopefully!) over. Given the general tumult and peculiar furors of this year, we could all probably use a day to treat yo' self, so please enjoy some end-of-year...
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On Abstract Text and the Concrete Object: An Interview with Amaris Ketcham
"The graph, like the photograph, has an air of authority, authenticity to it. The audience interprets these as factual documents first, without questioning them."Amaris Ketchamteaches interdisciplinary...
View ArticleRiding the Wave: Marcia Aldrich on Diversifying the CNF Anthology
Riding the Wave: Marcia Aldrich on diversifying the CNF anthologyI practically bounded up the stairs to class on my first day of creative nonfiction teaching practicum. Over a year of trying to excite...
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Preamble to a coversation with Albert Goldbarth
Maybe it was this line that did it (?): “Earlier, I said, ‘in a trough between crests’—sea imagery. I mean in part that dark, as it grows deeper, takes the world away, and a sleepless body will float...
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In conversation with Albert Goldbarth, via many postcards
You'll find a longer preamble to this back & forth in the post just previous, but the quick low-down:Last summer, when we heard about Albert Goldbarth's new collection—The Adventures of Form and...
View ArticleAnder Monson on David LeGault, Obsession, and The Bad Idea Essay
Well damn, I see it's Wednesday night and the post we had queued up for this week has not yet appeared. Will emailed to say he was working on it, whatever it is. I could probably head over to the Essay...
View ArticleBreaking Eggs & Rules with Nicole Walker
Since Nicole's beat for this column, aside from eggs, is breaking the rules, in which she asks other cool kids about how they break the rules, and since she has a new book, Egg, coming out from Object...
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